Bridge progression#1065

After reaching the ability to do 150+ glute bridges over three sets, I thought I’d move on to the next step in the progression (straight bridges). I’m sorry to discover I can’t do more than two or three of these safely (managing a diastasis). I wonder whether this is a common enough problem to warrant adding another intermediate step to the bridge progression. (For now I’ll replace this exercise with feet-elevated glute bridges and keep building my strength!)

I’ve talked about this with Hampton before as I also felt that it sat in a bit of a strange place - you can try elevating your hands like you would with incline pushups, or keep your legs a bit bent and closer to you, or skip ahead to the wall bridges - less load but will still gradually build up the necessary arm and back strength, so those are all options you could try :)

Side note; if you wanna make the glute bridges harder in different ways, you can also progress to single leg glute bridges and long lever bridges!

Was just going to suggest single leg glute bridges, Lars. They are an incredible progression from this!

Thank you! I’ll experiment with these options and see what feels like the right size challenge for my body.

Thanks I’ll also try those as I found the progression between glute bridges and straight bridge quite steep. I can only do about 1 x rep of 10 with form and feel a serious lack of strength / mobility in my upper body.

I agree this exercise needs more progression steps. Going from level 3 glute bridges and i couldn’t do a single straight bridge. Ive been doing table top bridges instead and after a couple of weeks building up to 2 sets of 10-12, today i did my fisrst somewhat acceptable straight bridge, maybe 3?
I really like the new notes section and have started using it to log what accommodations im giving myself when the progression levels are too far apart for my strength, flexibility and skill

Yeah, that jump from glute bridges to straight bridges catches a lot of people off guard. It’s a much bigger leap than it looks on paper. I think you handled it well though. Instead of forcing reps that weren’t there yet, you found a middle ground with tabletop bridges and built up from there. The fact that you got your first few solid straight bridges today is a pretty good sign that the approach is working.